


broken trust, but you are not broken

by literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Panic Attacks, Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 14:35:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1691813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte/pseuds/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She did not feel safe in her room. She did not feel safe as Ginny Weasley.</p>
            </blockquote>





	broken trust, but you are not broken

Ginny blinked at the morning sun leaking through her curtains. The yellow light looked unreal, too soft, too gentle, as it stretched timidly over her bed.

She blinked again at her room and turned to look out her window. Outside, the dawn peeked, rosy pink and fresh, over the horizon. Upstairs, she could hear her brothers rustling themselves awake for breakfast. Her mother would be in the kitchen by now, flicking her wand at the pans and walking towards the staircase to call her children to the table.

The knuckles of her fist whitened as she gripped her blanket in her hands, wringing the loose gray threads in her fingers. Her face felt tight, but her scalp itched with sweat. She untwisted her hands, and a cramp started to build up in her wrist.

Breathe, she reminded herself. Just as her mother told her when she fell off a broom the first time she stole one from her brothers - she remembered what her mom had said, “In and out, in an out, in and out.” All while scolding her, of course, and casting a healing spell at her cut. But a healing spell couldn't calm her down with grass stains on her legs and the tingling ghost of the fall in her skin.

She tried to make herself breathe normally but figured somewhere later in the day she would still have a panic attack, and the thought made her fear expand with her chest.

Not now, not when she could lay in her bed and stare at the bookcase across from her bed until it become the fixed point she needed to stop herself from breaking into sobs. She wouldn't have a panic attack here.

The sunlight trickled down in a slushy pattern onto her carpet, the shadows of her furniture colliding against it. Ginny squeezed her crusted, purple-creased eyes shut as the familiar memories tried to come to her, beckoning.

Her toes curled as she crumbled back onto her pillow, pulling the blankets back over her head. In a few minutes she could compose herself, walk down the stairs as if she hadn't let He Who Must Not Be Named into her head. As if she didn't worry that he was still in there, scratching on the walls of her skull, lingering in her nightmares, living in her brain, as strong as he was when she invited him in through the diary. As if she didn't look at her fingers and imagine blood on them, trailing a red message to all of Hogwarts, because no matter how much she reassured herself that she was possessed, the guilt and horror felt all too real.

All night Ginny laid in bed and considered things, the awful terrible things that a man had done to a young girl for the sake of power and because of the fact that he could. How safe she had felt, to confide in a seemingly innocent diary, the pretense of comfort he had laid thick as cream – but none of him was safe.

Her first year of Hogwarts. A young girl, a young witch who stole her brothers brooms, who had trouble brushing her hair in the morning and broke Fred's nose for putting some kind of sticky paste on her hairbrush once that turned her red hair green for a week, she wouldn't admit that it was hilarious and stuck her tongue out at him whenever she saw him or George, and then she found a diary.

And then she woke up on a cold, wet dungeon floor and there was the great horrible face of a stone man above her. She could still feel the headache in the back of her skull.

Coming back to the Burrow was hard. Her name was Ginny Weasley, she had a large family, her hair was frequently compared to fire, Harry Potter said she glowed like the setting sun when she blushed. She did not feel safe in her room. She did not feel safe as Ginny Weasley.

She would walk down the stairs, hug her mom, say good morning to everyone, and eat a lovely breakfast surrounded by a loving family. In time she will find ways of recovery besides forcing it down, and Ginny will met people who are sincerely safe and open their own wounded arms to her. Other survivors of terrible men. She finds recovery. But, with the year behind her still biting at her heels, the time was not now.

Right now her bones felt like paper, and Ginny wanted to crumple up the pages.


End file.
